Keep These Laws In Mind When Dealing With Public Officials

(Originally published in The Business Journal)

Is your street riddled with potholes? Do you have a neighbor who doesn’t keep up their yard? What about a street light that’s been out for several weeks?

The first thing most people would do is call their local elected official to inform them of the problem.

But what if you are a business owner trying to start up a business or looking for a new location? Surely, our local officials would be interested in talking to you.

In making that contact, there are three state laws you need to be aware of as you engage in your discussions with these local officials.

Public Records Act

In Ohio, public offices must keep “records” for a specified period of time and produce them upon request.

A “record” is any item that is kept by a public office that: (1) is stored on a fixed medium, (2) created, received, or sent under the jurisdiction of a public office and (3) documents the organization, functions, policies, decisions, procedures, operations, or other activities of the office.

For you, the key word is “received,” which means your letter, email or voicemail to a public official probably will fall within that definition. Of course, there are exceptions to what must be produced, but, to be cautious, consider that anything of importance will fall under this definition.

Photographs, videos, maps, voice mails, emails, and computer files might fall under this definition. It is the content of the message that determines whether the message is a public record.

Even emails sent to or from a public official’s personal email address can fall under this definition. Thus, public officials cannot hide behind personal email addresses to shield emails from the Public Records Act.

The next time you send an email or leave a voicemail for a public official to discuss an action that the official’s office may take, you should consider that someone else may end up reading it or that it may end up in a newspaper article.

Open Meetings Act

If you are dealing with township officials, for example, do not expect to meet two or three officials at one time to discuss your issue, since two of them constitute a quorum of the board of township trustees.

This raises questions about whether the trustees are having a “meeting” for purposes of the Open Meetings Act.

The open meetings law requires that if any public body has a meeting, it must give appropriate notice of the meeting, open it to the public and prepare minutes of it. The purpose of the law is to avoid secret, back-room deals.

A formal action taken by a public body in violation of the open meetings law can result in that action being invalidated by a court. This concept has also been extended to situations where a public body took a formal action in an open meeting, but the action was invalidated when it resulted from deliberations that improperly occurred in a meeting not open to the public.

The lesson: Working with public officials may be more tedious than you anticipated. They are constrained by laws that make sure the public’s business is open to the public.

Ethics Law

It should be common knowledge that the law does not allow you to bribe public officials with gifts. But the Ethics Law goes beyond this prohibition.

Public officials and employees cannot use their authority or influence to secure something of value or solicit or accept something of value from an improper source. Private parties, i.e., you, cannot give or promise a substantial thing of value.

The statute defines “anything of value” as money, goods, future employment, interest in real estate and every other thing of value.

In short, a public official or employee cannot accept gifts from any party that is doing or seeking to do business with, regulated by, or interested in matters before the public agency.   Please do not be offended if a public official or employee turns down your request to buy lunch or tickets to a baseball game.

The next time you are working with a public official, keep these laws in mind. It may help you navigate the governmental waters a little bit easier and may save you from unwanted attention.

Vansuch can be reached at mvansuch@hhmlaw.com or at (330) 392-1541.